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very involved in the actual creation of content. More importantly, projects such as «PDPal» use people’s «image of the city» [13] to self-represent «their» city. Aggregated together, these imagemaps create a «communicity» that is an emergent public space based on use and knowledge «on the ground,» rather than a formally articulated park or plaza. While some artists and artist groups create tools and platforms for a participating public to self-represent, others entice the public into participating in public spaces, such as Valie Export’s classic «Tap and Touch Cinema» or Keith Obadike’s selling his blackness in the virtual public marketplace of eBay. [14] Other artists, rather than personally performing, intervene in the spatial fabric of the city, so to speak, from Nicolas Schöffer’s «Tour Spatiodynamique Cybernétique de Liège»(1961) to Peter Cook and Colin Fournier’s Kunsthaus Graz (2003) to Diller + Scofidio’s «Facsimile»(2004). In the case of both public performances and public architectural interventions, the contemporary situation is hybrid—it is both physical and virtual, just as the realm of the new public sphere is.

It is in regard to communications systems that

artists have perhaps most clearly and decisively expanded notions of the public sphere. As Inke Arms notes, «Since the 1970s, artists have used their work to address the way public space is increasingly being transformed by the influence of (mass) media and private commercial interests.» [15] From the mail art correspondence of Ray Johnson to the billboards and signage of Les Levine and Jenny Holzer to the media walls of Dara Birnbaum to Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s «Electronic Café» to Guillermo Gómez-Pena’s [Pena mit Tilde auf n!]hijacking of cable television to Robert Adrian X’s «World in 24 Hours» to the streaming media and low power fm radio transmissions of radioqualia, artists have been instrumental in understanding the possibilities of this infrastructure as more than a marketing channel but as a system of communication to engender a questioning, participatory public.

In her essay, «Constructing Media Spaces,» Josephine Bosma argues that forms of networked art, in particular, are progenitors of what media theorist calls «public domain 2.0,»and that the works of the artists described in her text «bring people closer to